AdamK:i guess if the pitcher was moving his arm at .9c it would cause an explosion before the ball left his hand

I doubt the arm would remain structurally sound at any significant fraction of c. It's probably more possible for *magic*, as Owangotang puts it, to accelerate the ball to 0.9c than for the pitcher to do it.

Gosling:Egoy3k: The pitcher gets his name in the hall of fame but with a (*) next to it.

Only if he's played at least ten seasons. Aroldis Chapman pulling this tonight would result in him being out of luck. As well as flesh and anything resembling a bone structure.

Nah, he wouldn't need 10 seasons to get in. Addie Joss only played 8 seasons. Joss, like our hypothetical pitcher here, died in the middle of his career, and was given special consideration.

However, it's unlikely he'd be in the Hall anyway, for a different reason. HOF rule 6 states

"6. Automatic Elections: No automatic elections based on performances such as a batting average of .400 or more for one (1) year, pitching a perfect game or similar outstanding achievement shall be permitted."

This pitch is clearly an "outstanding achievement" (if we ignore the wizards) and so would not be worthy of automatic election.

But what Randall didn't account for was that the catcher had his Higgs Boson Adjusting Device and he dialed down the mass of the baseball to nothing so therefore the pitch was actually able to exceed c and was able to strike out the batter yesterday. We can worry about the effects of the gamma rays tomorrow.

escherblacksmith:What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Therefore the mechanics getting to that point are irrelevant. The main question is what is a baseball going .9C going to do.

I would be very curious to see his experiment carried out further - assume the bat is moving at 0.9c in the swinging motion the instant it strikes the ball over the plate. The relativistic effects of two objects traveling in opposite directions at 0.9c making contact, the energy release, the newly fused elements (wood + the remainder of the plasma ball core), etc. That would be pretty cool.

You know, man, if we ever make it home, I'm going to do so much farking cocaine. I'm gonna rape so many flaming biatches. I'll be like, "What time is it? After 5:00? Damn. Time to go rape me some flaming biatches."

escherblacksmith:Owangotang: What the...? OK So a pitcher throws a ball 80 mph, then it "magically" accelerates to .9c? Then SCIENCE!

So it's normal pitch, then magic, then science.

Keep it.

or . . . you know, you could read the article . . . whatever works for you.

The question was:

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Therefore the mechanics getting to that point are irrelevant. The main question is what is a baseball going .9C going to do.

//interesting thought experiment.\messy outcome.

Not true.

The comic actually makes a point of showing the pitcher throwing the ball at 80mph, then it magically accelerates to .9C. That's not a thought experiment and it's not science.

Now if we want to consider a baseball that somehow accelerates to .9C without having been thrown by a pitcher that's fine, however the whole thing is essentially the same as saying "A pitcher throws a baseball that magically transmogrifies itself into a bear with pterodactyl arms, check out what happens next!"

Owangotang:The comic actually makes a point of showing the pitcher throwing the ball at 80mph, then it magically accelerates to .9C. That's not a thought experiment and it's not science.

Einstein imagined himself riding a beam of light when he was thinking about relativity. Something exactly as possible as what happens with the pitch in TFA. Thought experiments don't need to be realistic in their set up, it's the details that matter.

Khellendros:escherblacksmith: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

Therefore the mechanics getting to that point are irrelevant. The main question is what is a baseball going .9C going to do.

I would be very curious to see his experiment carried out further - assume the bat is moving at 0.9c in the swinging motion the instant it strikes the ball over the plate. The relativistic effects of two objects traveling in opposite directions at 0.9c making contact, the energy release, the newly fused elements (wood + the remainder of the plasma ball core), etc. That would be pretty cool.

"A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch"...

Technically, the rule isn't clear.

"If the ball is in the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a strike, whether or not the batter tries to avoid the ball. If the ball is outside the strike zone when it touches the batter, it shall be called a ball if he makes no attempt to avoid being touched."

Since the ball would be both in and out of the strike zone, there would be no obvious ruling.

Tobin_Lam:The batter hasn't even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does.

I thought the ball was going .9C, not C

At near the speed of light (.9c), the photons from the ball would reach the batter's eye approximately 6 (2 meters) feet before the ball would. Once the light reaches the photoreceptors in the retina (rods and cones), an action potential is generated, that travels along the optic nerve and into the visual cortex. Once there, it is processed (conscious thought is said to travel at 20-30 meters per second, or on the slower end of nerve impulses). The action potential takes one or two ms. Then it must propagate along the optic nerve (20-30mm long). The upper end of nerve impulses approach 100 meters per second (in the case of motor neurons, not sure about optic nerves though). Let's say after the first millisecond, it takes another .0002 seconds (or 1/5th of a millisecond) for the action potential to move along the optic nerve. Let's be conservative now and say it is processed by 10 centimeters of neurons in your visual cortex. We're at 1.2 milliseconds at the low end at the moment. At 30 meters per second (the speed that "thought" takes place), it takes .03333 seconds (33 milliseconds) to be processed. If this was Wrigley Field, the ball, if it were to keep going at .9c, would reach Buenos Aires, Argentina (5,580 miles from Chicago) before the batter would biochemically "see" the ball.

By the time the batter sends motor impulses to his muscles to attempt a swing, the ball would probably be closer to the moon than Earth, or would have circumnavigated the globe a few times.

And if I misplaced a decimal point, the ball will still be very, very far away before the batter registers it visually.